I do a lot of arranging and composing in Dorico.
Often I need to be able to play my keyboard with a piano sound when arranging for wood wind or choir, to be able to hear certain harmonies where a flute path will sound awkward. So I thought if it would be possible to have a function in Dorico, that would let me switch between the instrument that I’m currently editing AND a predefined instrument (piano) that could kind of act as my grand, like in the old (not good old!) days where I did my arrangements at the piano.
You know press esc to get out of input mode and then maybe an a to switch to piano sound, and when the testing of the arrangement is finished hit the enter again, to continue to input notes.
A secondary option could be to let the user decide, that whenever Dorico is NOT in input mode, the midi thru should be playing the piano sound.
How does that sound?
A search of the forum will yield several recent threads about this very topic. Here’s one: https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=160148
LOL, I just requested this very thing a week ago on this thread too:
My workaround is to have a piano sound running in the background using a Garritan sound in Aria. I have Voicemeeter running too as it is a freeware program that will allow multiple ASIO streams. (I’m sure there are others as well.) This way whenever I touch my keyboard I hear the Garritan piano sound, even with Dorico running. To shut the Dorico sounds on/off, I just hit F3 to bring up the mixer, click “m” to mute/unmute it above the output slider, and press F3 again to hide the mixer.
Being able to set MIDI Thru to the piano sound as I do in Finale would be a very welcome feature for me as well.
As a side-note to this, I use an app called DLS-Midi-Synth, from the Mac App Store, which basically hooks up your MIDI keyboard to MacOS’s built-in General MIDI samples.
That way, even when Dorico/Logic/etc isn’t running or setup, I always have sounds at hand. And if my Dorico instruments are a bit ethereal, I still have a piano to fall back on.
Not affiliated, just a happy customer.